American director Paul Thomas Anderson is frank about how his Venice Film Festival-winning movie, The Master, ended up raising the curtain on Allanah Zitserman and Stavros Kazantzidis’ inaugural Cock­atoo Island Film Festival.

He was persuaded to fly to a small island in the middle of Sydney Harbour at the other end of the world by a pitch from Joel Pearlman, managing director of the film’s local distributor Roadshow Film.

“The idea of the festival was very appealing to me,” says Anderson – the director of Punch Drunk Love, Magnolia, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. “It’s kind of fun to be part of the first of something, rather than the 50th or 75th.”

The local appearance is quite a coup for the fledgling festival, launched from the ashes of the Dungog Film Festival, and for which Zitserman and Kazantzidis have spent 14 months raising the $2 million budget, including putting their house on the market to fund a $500,000 sponsorship shortfall.

Enigmatic – and long at 137 minutes – it features career-defining performances from
Joaquin Phoenix
and
Philip Seymour Hoffman
as an L Ron Hubbard style post-war messiah.

The film has polarised opinion in the US, attracting rave reviews and head scratching in equal measure. But its stunning central performances will almost inevitably be noticed come Oscar time, not least because the film’s distributor is an outfit with extensive recent form in that area, the Weinstein Company.

Known for carefully calibrated, slow-build strategies that have turned small independent films into Oscar phenomena, from Pulp Fiction to The King’s Speech and The Artist, Harvey Weinstein has been on the comeback trail after leaving Miramax in 2005.

“That is something that he does for his films; he tries to build up as much momentum as he can,” Anderson says. “He is dealing with films that would otherwise have limited box office appeal. And Harvey isn’t a major studio. He can’t buy billboards or run television campaigns to generate interest. We aren’t even an obscure European film [typical Weinstein fodder in the past] but we are regarded as pretty peculiar, particularly in the country I come from.”

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As for how Pearlman came to front one of the US’s pre-eminent directors, the festival’s founders basically plied him with booze and took him on a ride around the island.

“We took him on a private trip around the island in the champagne buggy,” says Zitserman. “He promised us a film, it turned out to be The Master and they brought Paul Thomas Anderson.”

It was only one of many events to raise funds for the festival, which runs until October 28, and which included a private dinner for 60 at Mark Bouris’ Watsons Bay house at which Malcolm Turnbull spoke.